Hardcover, 272 pages
English language
Published May 4, 2022 by Knopf.
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American …
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.
An easy read, and the crossovers with her other books were interesting. I enjoyed this one quite a bit.
Zadna hvezda nesviti na porad.
Zadna hvezda nesviti na porad.
Zadna hvezda nesviti na porad.
Krasna knizecka. Opet trosku obava z pandemicke vlozky, prezil sem. Pro fandy hard bude cestovani casem jiste usmevny. Ale proste podobne jako ve Stanici 11 je tady spousta "poezie" v pribehu. Zaokrouhluju na ctyri hvezdy.
Although the time anomaly and time travel in this book are of the standard variety the author manages to give the concept an uniqie and compelling spin. It's more about the characters that encounter the anomaly and are linked through it while they're unstuck and kind of isolated in their own time. I appreciated the inclusion of pandemics in the narrative but it's a little depressing that people don't seem to have learned from them even centuries in the future. There are some minor flaws but I liked the overall feel of the book.
I was utterly mesmerised by this book. I have no idea why. I downloaded it as an audiobook from Libby, started it - and I was hooked. I could have read it in one day. I couldn't stop listening the story unfold. It wasn't a page-turner like a thriller. I was simply caught up and swept along. Mesmerised, as I said. You hear about several different people living a century or two apart. There doesn't seem to be a connection other than a strange little incident that they experience. I forced myself to stop reading yesterday just to attend to some practical matters, but I longed to forget about everything other than the book and just read it in one go.
Hmmm. I don't know how to talk about this without spoilers, and I certainly don't want to give spoilers. I wonder if I am picking up on and relating …
I was utterly mesmerised by this book. I have no idea why. I downloaded it as an audiobook from Libby, started it - and I was hooked. I could have read it in one day. I couldn't stop listening the story unfold. It wasn't a page-turner like a thriller. I was simply caught up and swept along. Mesmerised, as I said. You hear about several different people living a century or two apart. There doesn't seem to be a connection other than a strange little incident that they experience. I forced myself to stop reading yesterday just to attend to some practical matters, but I longed to forget about everything other than the book and just read it in one go.
Hmmm. I don't know how to talk about this without spoilers, and I certainly don't want to give spoilers. I wonder if I am picking up on and relating to the pandemic vibes. If I recall correctly (I don't feel like checking Google right now), this was written during the pandemic or strongly influenced by the pandemic. I read the author's earlier book, Station 11, in the early part of the pandemic, and was slightly freaked out by its apparent prescience. I thought about all that going into this. One person in the story wrote a book about a pandemic back in the 1700s and goes on a book tour for that book. The fact that a character in the book wrote about a pandemic inside a book written in the pandemic did register with me. I found it, well, maybe not amusing in the usual sense of amusing, but I definitely gave it a nod.
This is my second book by this author. I have The Glass Hotel marked as "to read". I notice that one of the characters in this book gets a whole book there to themselves. Good! I must read it soon. I feel drawn to the storytelling of Emily St. John Mandel...
Pretty good. Kept me hooked, but I felt that it didn't have the emotional impact that it could have had.
I'll never get over Emily St. John Mandel's ability to weave many different simple narratives into a compelling braid of a story that still manages to have surprises, twists, and turns without being overly bulky or needing extensive exposition. She always holds you right on the cusp of confusion, making you think you lost the plot, but you didn't. She will reel you right back in. This was the case for Station Eleven, and The Glass Hotel, and Sea of Tranquility was no exception.
In this book we follow a few different narratives, and those who have read her previous other works will find some familiar. Edwin St. Andrew is the lesser son of some English nobles, sent to colonized Canada in 1912 as a punishment where he experiences something extraordinary, and almost alien in the Canadian Wilderness. A man watches. Vincent (a character readers of the author's works may …
I'll never get over Emily St. John Mandel's ability to weave many different simple narratives into a compelling braid of a story that still manages to have surprises, twists, and turns without being overly bulky or needing extensive exposition. She always holds you right on the cusp of confusion, making you think you lost the plot, but you didn't. She will reel you right back in. This was the case for Station Eleven, and The Glass Hotel, and Sea of Tranquility was no exception.
In this book we follow a few different narratives, and those who have read her previous other works will find some familiar. Edwin St. Andrew is the lesser son of some English nobles, sent to colonized Canada in 1912 as a punishment where he experiences something extraordinary, and almost alien in the Canadian Wilderness. A man watches. Vincent (a character readers of the author's works may be familiar with), has a same experience at the same place in the wilderness in 1994, filming with a personal camera. A man watches. In 2020, Mirella, a former friend of Vincent's, is looking for her, and comes to an experimental art show put on by Vincent's brother where he shows Vincent's recording of that event in 1994. A man watches. Olive is an author from the second colony of the moon in 2203. She's doing a book tour on Earth while the beginnings of a pandemic break out. A man watches. In 2401, Gaspery is a man living in the second colony in of the moon, aka Night City, who gets wrapped up in the business of his sister who works for an agency that governs time travel.
St. John Mandel's strength has always been structure and composition. She is truly an expert at revolutionizing how a story is told without burdening the reader with knots of stories. Her character work is also always something to look forward to as well. I love how she sometimes only allows us a surface level understanding of a character, like Edwin (even if maybe they're a protagonist) while others we get an in-depth, deep dive into their psyche, like Olive. It mirrors our own relationships with the people in our lives.
I continue to be impressed with everything I read from Emily St. John Mandel, and I will read everything she's written at this point. I should warn potential readers, while not necessary, it would be beneficial for you to read, at the very least, The Glass Hotel before you read this book. If you want some more small Easter eggs, you should also read Station Eleven before reading.
I felt like the plot was a little forced around a very cool concept.
Speculative, time-travelling fiction.
in general a big fan of this linked trilogy and this felt like a good extension of the others. it gets better as it goes along / if you live as if it's real, it will be real
Sea of Tranquility is probably the best time travel story I’ve read. Super interesting and so well written
Was easy to read - that's what I needed at this time, and enjoyed the characters and plot. A great author.
I liked the intertwined storylines and i thought the characters were well drawn and sympathetic. The only problem I had was the idea of the continuation of culture over hundreds of years. it rang false to me.
I found this touching and hopeful, I liked how poignantly the characters were drawn, and the themes of kindness and the vicissitudes of life.
My main complaint was that I think the simulation theory stuff was basically an unnecessary macguffin and didn't add to the themes (at least as far as they interested me).
whoaa... outstanding twist, i loved the way the author gradually hinted at the possible complication and outcome of the plot. i wish we'd heard more about mirella though.
A good, short book. It got me entertained enought that I read in basically one go on a trip.
Purchasable
https://www.ebooks.com/en-ca/book/210334140/sea-of-tranquility/emily-st-john-mandel/.